A touch of historical judicial versifying with something of a topical edge today,[i] dealing with alleged mistreatment of horses …
(I should mention that there is also a measure of everyday racism in the surrounding facts).
Newspaper reports of April 1910 [coming to you courtesy of the mighty National Library of Wales] tell of hilarity in court at the poetic performance of Phillimore J, in a case, Red Man Syndicate Ltd. v. Associated Newspapers Limited which included evidence from a Yeovil Builder about the pulling of horses’ (or ‘bronchos’) ears in a cruel manor, at or in preparation for a ‘Wild West’ show at Earl’s Court. Phillimore, unable to contain his finely-tuned literary tendencies, MC Phillimore J gave us ‘an old rhyme’
There was an old man with a beard,
Who sat on a pony that reared;
When they cried Never fear,”
He held on by one ear,
That courageous man with a beard.
The report notes that there was ‘great laughter’, possibly so great that the hearing was adjourned. Or, then again, there may not have been a causal connection between those two things.
Is this a real ‘old poem’? There is one Edward Lear poem that starts the same way, but gallops off (!) in a different direction, and another, closer to this theme, which is horsier, but not the same.[ii] Was the judge treating his audience to his own literary stylings? The dodgy last line (right number of syllables, stress not quite there, unless ‘courageous’ is pronounced in a weird way …) might suggest so.[iii]
Anyway, it’s another vignette from that odd world of light moments in litigation so beloved of late 19th C/ early 20th C newspapers. All rather ‘The [legal] past is [we hope] another country’.
GS
29/7/2024.
Image, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: a horse, taking no chances with the ear-pulling thing.
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[i] For an earlier posts on judges and limericks, see here.
[ii] The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), pp 3, 45.
[iii] A general point – really don’t like the repeated endings in lines 1 and 5 in this style of limerick. Maybe I just prefer these things with a proper punchline rather than the more circling, reflective style. And this style seems slightly lazy, in that it does not require a third A-rhyme.